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Higher education

Mentors at Ohio State help Latino youth

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoCourtney Hergesheimer | DispatchMia Underdown, a graduate student at Ohio State University, works with Javier Del Valle, 16, a sophomore at Dublin Scioto High School, as part of the LASER mentoring program for Latino students.

At age 15, Martin Perez found himself working in a tortilla factory on Columbus’ West Side — 247
miles from his family home in Michigan.

His parents had invested in the factory and they thought he was old enough to join an older
brother who worked there. Perez kept a grueling schedule, working 30 hours a week around his
high-school classes.

“I was working all the time,” he said. “I was tired all the time. It was then that I knew that I
wanted to go to college.”

Perez started taking college classes at Columbus State Community College during his senior year
in high school, driven by the desire to get a business degree so he could improve the factory. But
as one of only a few Latino students in his classes, he came to realize that what he really wanted
to do was to help people from immigrant families.

After transferring to Ohio State University, he joined a mentoring program on campus called
LASER that is trying to increase the number of Latino students at schools such as OSU.

“I felt really excited about furthering my education and making something out of myself, and I
wanted to share that with other Latino students who might not have had the strong support system
that I did,” he said.

Latinos are the largest ethnic minority group in the country and are expected to become the
majority in the United States by 2043. They already are the majority in 28 large U.S. cities,
according to the U.S. Census, and Ohio’s Latino numbers have grown 64 percent in the past decade.
But they continue to be the most-underrepresented group in college, said Frederick Luis Aldama, an
English professor and founder and director of LASER.

For every 100 Latino elementary students nationwide, only 46 will graduate from high school and
only 25 percent will go on to college, Aldama said. Latinos make up the third-largest minority
group at Ohio State, representing 3 percent of the university’s 63,058 students. Ohio’s population
is 3.1 percent Latino, the 2010 census said, and Franklin County is 4.8 percent Latino. Aldama
wants to pair OSU students with promising high-school students and OSU grad students with
undergraduates who are struggling.

So far, the group has trained 50 mentors — 19 of whom have been paired with 30 high-school
students. It hopes eventually to have each of the 50 mentors linked up with two high-school
students as it expands its partnership with area schools. Perez, who is now 20, is creating
resources specifically for Latino men because they are less likely than Latino women to enroll in
or graduate from college.

The program has three goals:

• Prepare high-school students for college through weekly academic-coaching sessions with their
mentor at the OSU campus. The college students encourage the high-school students to take
college-prep classes and develop good study habits.

• Connect the high-school students to role models and activities, both academic and
extracurricular, that will help get them into college and succeed there.

• Walk the high-school students through the college-application process, including how to
prepare for the ACT or SAT, write essays and gather letters of recommendation.

“While we see the potential of our students, they sometimes need to hear it from someone other
than a school official or family member,” said Cathleen Johnson, a counselor at Westland High
School, which joined the program in January.

And it helps when they have a role model who “looks like they do, comes from a background like
theirs or who shares other similar qualities who says, ‘I’m not going to let you fail,’ ” she
said.

In addition to the mentoring, the group hosts a series of talks and networking events.

Junot Diaz, a Dominican-born American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for example, is scheduled to talk on March 19. And
LASER plans to bring about 80 local high-school students to campus for its annual Latino Role
Models Day on April 12.

It also gives out scholarships and research awards to students for their academic success and
volunteer service.

“It’s all about personalizing the experience and exposing the high-school students to people who
have succeeded in life so they think, ‘I can do that!’ ” said Mia Underdown, a 22-year-old
graduate student in accounting who is mentoring two high-school students from Dublin.